Today in TV History: Superman Got to Be a Really Handsome Teen in ‘Smallville’

Of all the great things about television, the greatest is that it’s on every single day. TV history is being made, day in and day out, in ways big and small. In an effort to better appreciate this history, we’re taking a look back, every day, at one particular TV milestone.

WHY IT’S IMPORTANT: When Smallville premiered in the fall of 2001, the superhero landscape was essentially barren. We were still two years away from the FIRST Hulk movie. Batman Begins wasn’t for four years. The less said about Superman Returns in five years, the better. Smallville wasn’t part of a larger cinematic (or television) universe. It was just there, on its own, telling the story of a teenage Superman in the cornfields of Kansas.

In the weeks before Smallville premiered, the advertising was wall-to-wall with the same shot, of series star Tom Welling, shirtless in a corn field, tied up to a post, with an “S” that looked awfully familiar spray-painted onto his (it must be mentioned: broad and glistening) chest. The imagery wasn’t un-troubling. Only a few years removed from the hate-crime murder of gay teen Matthew Shepard, who was beaten and left to die while tied to a fencepost, the imagery of a bullied Midwestern teen tied to a post blurred some lines. Smallville‘s intentions were pure, however, and any bubbling controversy was quickly forgotten.

The pilot episode of Smallville laid out a revamped version of the Superman myth. He arrives in Smallville as a child amid a meteor shower. While the movies up until this point had established Lois Lane as Clark Kent’s great love, his high school years are spent crushing on Lana Lang. And young Clark is best friends with a young Lex Luthor. This kind of mixing and matching with aspects of Superman’s history creating something relatively fresh and new. The Superman of Smallville stands on his own.

Clearly, the Smallville writers and producers were doing something right, because the teenage Superman show went and lasted TEN seasons. That’s a lot of somebody saaaaaaaaaaaaving the good people of Kansas (and later Metropolis).

Here’s another piece of trivia for you: the Smallville pilot was directed by David Nutter, the massively acclaimed TV director who took home an Emmy award for directing the fifth season finale of Game of Thrones (“Shame. Shame. Shame.”).